Oh, and other than that, I am going to announce the future of GeminiGeek’s Online Journal.

As of today onwards. I will be officially rambling about my life and other personal stuff on my other blog. The link? Well, it’s for you to find out. It’s actually up since April, and I’ve been blogging over there for since then.

And as for this blog, it will still be here, up and running, pinching every cents from Adsense and other Ads provider. I will also use this blog to satisfy the geeky side of me. I’d probably write about all the website design stuff and techniques over time, as I still have to finish my building GeminiGeek’s Online Journal series.

So… yeah, it’s not really dead yet. I could probably turn it into a political blog and blog as my alter ego.

1. Native Tagging Support. Now this is one feature that I’ve been waiting for. Although UTW did a great job on this, but I always think that it is good to do the tagging without going through a plugin. However, the tagging feature is not so great after all. More details on this further down.
2. Update Notification. I am someone who’s lazy to check plugin’s site to see any updates. With this, I can see it in my dashboard and download ‘em immediately. Though it doesn’t update for you automatically, this notification is sufficient
3. Canonical URLs. I’ve been using some .htaccess trick to achieve this, but looks like the devs manage to put in the core.
4. Better Post Management. There’s this new filter thing in your post management, and you can easily filter your drafts. Nifty.

There are more features in the developement blog.

The Upgrade Process

I thought the schema changes would kill my blog. I even created a testbed to test if the upgrades will work smoothly. I tried running the upgrades on the testbed. Everything works fine. Not as dramatic as Edrei’s case

The upgrade is a breeze if your plugin does not a direct call to the deprecated tables in your database. In my case, only KGArchives and Tan Tan WordPress Report fails. Author of KGArchives may be doing some updates on the plugin released a WP2.3 compatible KGArchives, but there’s no news on Tan Tan WordPress Report. UTW fails to work too, but there’s a UTW importer in WP2.3. Popular Post plugin have problem in the admin interface, but it works without a problem in the user end.

The transition from UTW to WP2.3 native tagging is rather painless, though there’s some iffy-ness somewhere in between. Now here’s a few things I don like about tagging in WP2.3:

1. There’s no proper tag management. It is said that the devs are waiting for the community to create plugins to further extend the tagging capabilities, and they can steal the idea and put them in the next release. So, I guess I have to wait for a while for a better tag management plugin to pop out.
2. Two words tagging fails. Space doesn’t work. All spaces in two words or more tags are replaced with a dash. UTW handles the presentation purpose with no problems, because I don’t see the dash in any tag titles, although there is in the admin area and slugs. Perhaps I have to make myself used to one word tagging.
3. The function to call out tags in a post, the_tags(), fails. I MUST use it in The Loop, which is kinda annoying because I have tags in the sidebar. Which is why, at the moment, I am not showing tags. Couldn’t something be done so that the_tags can be called anywhere in single.php?

Overall, WP2.3 is satisfactory, but not up to my liking.

I have also created a Contact page. This page holds information on how to contact me, and also a contact form if you want something more formal. That serves as a facility for people to contact me more easily and formally. And besides, I’ve decided to do freelancing on web design and accounts book-keeping more aggresively.

Other than that, I’ve did some minor visual enhancement to my site. The most notable one is the comments listing. Instead of alternating backgrounds, I changed it to alternating left border colour. I use the magic of :hover so that the comments backgrounds highlights as mouse over. I’ve also placed comment number so that replying comments can be a little bit easier because I’ve recently remove the comments quoting system.

And lastly, I’ve added a few 2 new emoticons, and 4 icons for commentors, and also myself to use. The 6 new icons are:
:love: :sweat: :heart: :nuke:
Well, it’s fun to have new icons to play with

My Future Plans

Get employed and settle down until next year to further my ACCA studies. If I happen to fail to secure a job, I will be doing freelance aggressively. At the moment, I offer affordable web design and web development service for individuals or companies who wants a website. I will also give consultations for those who needs to get their website up and running.

Other than that, I am also offering accounts book keeping service. I believe this is the first time for someone who’s doing web design and book-keeping at the same time! Well, the reason I’m doing book-keeping is because I have a partner who have the experience and is looking for opportunity. And me here, will help her to get clients and at the same time, help her and learn book-keeping for the commercial world. I am, after all a CAT graduate. It shouldn’t be weird for me to do this. However, I am accepting clients from Miri only for this book-keeping service.

Part #2: The Redesign

Ever since the Web2.0 hype on the internet, I always wanted to revamp my site and follow the trend. If you are a reader since day one, you should know that my site used to be known as Clueless Dream. And yes, my site is still number 1 ranking in Google (at the time I am writing this entry) for the keyword "clueless dream", which is weird, because I kinda dump the wording from my blog except for some older entries.

Old school design eh? Despite being old school, that design have better Adsense Click-Through-Rate than my current design! Well, I have to let-go of my ad-revenue for the sake of better looking site (at least to me) .

The Logo

I was still in the Web2.0 mood when I am doing the redesign. I figure why not create a logo for my blog? After fiddling around shapes tools in my Adobe Fireworks, I come out with this fiery shape thingy.

That is the original logo I created, before I turn it around and resize it. It is created with 9 Spiral shape, with a little shadows and a dip of gradients. Walla, I got my logo. I resize it and turn it around so that it look more like fiery shape thing. What you see currently in my header is the end result.

The Colours

When it comes to websites, for some reason I like the reds and pinks. In real life, I don’t wear or use anything pink. Weird eh? I remembered my previous design, the time when I released the first Cherry Berry, a lot of my friends asked me, “Since when a guy like you turn so faggoty?” Well, until now, I still can’t resist having pink in my blog. There you go, I am using pink in my links!

I used the Web Developer Tools to extract the colour information in my blog. See? I use a lot of blacks and greys, with some a pinch of pinks and reds. The combination isn't that bad I think. Well, I am not so much of a colour perfectionist, it works for me, and so far nobody complained about the colours, yet.

The Layout

I am not so much of a person with thousands of widgets to play around in the sidebar. That's why I only use single sidebar instead of dual sidebar. Because most people read from left to right, I guess it makes more sense to have the content in the left and sidebar on the right. In terms of SEO and readability, I have my Content to load first, followed by Sidebar. As for the Homepage, I have additional "Welcome Message" at the top for readers to easily navigate through the topics that I write.

The "Skeleton" of my current design. No paper version, I don't have scanner

For the sake of easier styling and a cleaner HTML, I sketched a skeleton on paper, and try style the DIVs accordingly. I am not going through the details because it will make this entry goes on and on and on. Hah Well, I might write on the creating a WordPress Theme Guides in the future

Tips and Tricks

Here are some tips and tricks for those of you who would love to customize a WordPress theme yourself

Ads in between Entries

A lot of people want to insert their Ads in between two entries on their WordPress blog, but don't know how. Well, I will show you how for now. It's really simple, just a play with numbers. Open your index.php and lets do the magic!

First, you look for this code.

Make changes to it by inserting some 2 line of codes:

Well, that's not all. Now look further down until you find endwhile. Add some codes before it so the end result would be:

And you will have post in between the first and the second entry.

The Nicer Category

The thing about WordPress when you post an entry into multiple categories, the_category() template tag will stupidly separate each category with a comma, or other separator that you chose. So, if your entry is posted in 3 categories, it will show as "Entry posted under Category, Category2, Category3". It makes more sense if it is "Entry posted under Category, Category2 and Category3". So, how do you do it? Well, open up functions.php in your theme folder and paste this code:

The next thing you do is replace the_category() in your theme files with the_nice_category(). Nifty eh?

Gravatar in Posts

One of the cool feature I implemented to TheMiak is the use of gravatar in a post! Well, now I will reveal the secret. Open up functions.php in your theme folder and paste this code.

The usage is the same as the gravatar plugin, only that the code you put is <?php gravatar_post() ?>, and it must be in within The_Loop.

That's it I guess. Stay tune for part 3 of this series, where I will write on how to create a more usable homepage, not just the default show latest blog post page.

Part #1: The Change of Site Structure

The first thing I did when doing revamp is to change my site structure. My blog used to be located at blog.geminigeek.com, and all pages resides in blog.geminigeek.com/xxxx. It doesn't seem wrong to me at first. But after a while, I guess I should better off pimping my domain rather than subdomain because there was a time where blog.geminigeek.com has PR5 and my geminigeek.com only PR3!! So, I changed my site's blog to geminigeek.com/blog.

When you talk about talk about PR, I'm sure you will think about the search engine result. I have a few blog entries that turns out to be first in Google Search. I don't want to lose my visitor. I did a 301 Redirection on my blog subdomain to geminigeek.com/blog, while retaining the permalink structure. This way, I manage to retain my visitor and successfully changed my site structure! And this is what I paste to my .htaccess in the root of blog subdomain:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^blog.geminigeek.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://geminigeek.com/blog/$1 [L,R=301]

This rule will automatically redirect blog.geminigeek.com/some/dir to geminigeek.com/blog/some/dir. Nifty eh? There's a lot you can do if you know how to use mod_rewrite. Too bad, I don't understand anything about it

Ok, I have the structure that I wanted. But because of this, a second problem arises. I installed my wordpress in a /blog directory of my domain root. That means that all my Pages will reside under my /blog directory. To make explanation simple, my About Page is now located at geminigeek.com/blog/about/!! And that doesn't make sense to me. Ah, call me a perfectionist, because even a small site structure thing is my concern I wanted my about pages in geminigeek.com/about/. The solution? Move the wordpress installation to domain root. However, by doing that, going to geminigeek.com/blog will throw a 404 File not found error. So, I leave it as it is.

Then, WordPress 2.1 is released, and there's a feature where you can set pages as your home and make your blog reside in some other pages. One good feature for those who wants to use WordPress as more than just a blogging platform. With this feature, I can put all my blog post in a /blog page and have my home used some other pages. And so, a new site structure like the this current one is born. Now my site structure makes more sense to me.

Tips for Part #1

1. Always think about the Search Engine, if your site traffic relies a lot on Search Engine traffic. Do proper 301 redirection if you're doing site structure change so that your site's URL is updated on the search engines index, and your site won't throw 404 error to the visitor.
2. WordPress 2.1 and above supports Static Front Page. For those who installs their wordpress in the domain root, but wants to have their blog in its own "virtual" /blog directory, use this feature. I will write on a guide to create an interactive homepage for your site.

For the next section, I will write about the layout and designing process for GeminiGeek's Online Journal. Stay tune.

Among the cool stuff in my homepage are:

• Featured Work. Now I get to show off 2 of my latest work.
• My Bookmarks. Powered by del.icio.us. I recently got addicted to social bookmarking. Yes people, add me to your network! Let's share some cool links!
• My Flickr. Obviously, it is powered by Flickr. I am not so much of an avid photographer, but I just wanted to share my pictures

Future plans? Put a Miri Bloggers Digest, alongside with my bookmarks and Flickr. I tried implementing it using the MiriCommunity's Bloggers List feed, but it doesn't turn out good. Somehow WordPress's get_rss function throws some PHP error that I don't even understand, so I can't debug it. It is a valid feed. Just that it is not friendly with WordPress I guess. Well, I guess I have to create my own list and digest on my own. Besides, I will be working on a Miri Bloggers Community, something very similiar to Penang Bloggers.

That's about it. :happy:

I just transfered myself from my previous free host to a paid local hosting company. After searching around for webhosting, I found DataKL and decided to host with them. And guess what? I bought a hosting from them because I thought it's cheap. And I didn't even consider how good is their uptime and support. Fortunately, they are bunch of good guys. Support has been speedy and friendly so far. Uptime, as claimed by them is 99.5% in the period of 3 months. I believe it's quite reasonable.

Why Change?

I have been a cheapskate for too long. I believe it's time for me to move along to serve myself and my readers better. Since most of my readers are from Malaysia, I believe changing to a local host is a good choice. Speed is great, and to compare with my previous US free host, it's way faster This is what I want, and this is also what I want my readers to enjoy

Comparison??

Of course, before I decide to host with DataKL, I did survey around for hosting. I did consider Exabytes and IPServerone, but both of them is so expensive. All of their hosting plans are over RM100. Overbudget la.. I did consider Hive Hosting too, since it's from Sarawak. Just search for "hive" in WebHostingTalk, you'll be surprised with the complains.

There are other web hosting that is within my budget, but their space and bandwidth allocation is too little. See? I am such a cheap skate. But fortunately, DataKL provide a special plan, which is cheap and has reasonable space and bandwidth. I quickly signup with them since the offer is limited to 150 accounts only.

Conclusion

Speedy and friendly support is what people wants. And it would be better if support is available through Instant Messenger like MSN or Y!M. Support would be even faster that way. So here it is, free advertisement to you people since you all are doing a great job. Keep up the good work

Updates: Lately my WordPress is double pinging PPS and BlogMalaysia. I wonder what is wrong with my WordPress installation? I will look through my wordpress and see if there's anything wrong with it.

Upgrading is a breeze, with the help of WinMerge. I just downloaded both version 2.1.3 and 2.2, then using WinMerge, I compare them and only upload changed files. After that, I run upgrade.php. This is so far the easiest major upgrade for WordPress, compare to my previous WP1.5 to WP2.0 upgrade which has too many changes and breaks almost ALL the plugins I use. Good job on this version. Kudos to the WordPress developer

I do hope upgrades will be as easy as this for the later version. Perhaps just downloading small upgrade script and all the upgrade is fully automatic? That would be great, but I'm not sure if it is possible or not

Note: For those who came from PPS, BlogsMalaysia Ping or Blogtal I am sorry for the multiple ping. I'm not sure what happened, but I think it's either my webhost's fault or glitch in WP2.2. I never install any auto-ping plugins, so I am now not sure what causes the problem. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Well, there's quite a number of changes made to this new version of my personal site. The most obvious one is the looks, of course. This new theme consist of 3 main color; white, pink and black. I believe all 3 colours fitted in well.

SubKiller requested me to release this theme, but bad news buddy, I am not going to release this theme, yet. I am currently working on Cherry Berry version 2, and the theme is most probably gonna look like this, of course without the bells and whistles added to this one I'm using. So, stay tune.

This theme is currently running a beta run, or whatever you call it. If you spotted any errors when navigating around, don't hesitate to leave a comment on this entry or contact me via my email or MSN Messenger at geminigeek [at] gmail [dot] com.

Right, let me explain the changes from Clueless Dream to GeminiGeek's Online Journal. Other than the looks, I've change the site structure. Instead of using the blog subdomain, I decided to change it to /blog directory. It makes more sense like this. For those linking me, it's time to change the URL. You can either link to me at www.geminigeek.com or www.geminigeek.com/blog.

I will be changing the categories and also rewriting all my profiles and about page. Probably will add some other stuff such as the commenting policy that I plan to do even before the revamp. I will also add a Projects page, so everyone can keep on track of what I am currently working on.

That's about it I guess. I will explain more on what did I do to my WordPress to get it work to the way I want.

At the mean time, you can enjoy my site, ad-less. This shouldn't be a bad thing. Hehehe